I'm going to be looking at a W701 where the owner completely wiped the drive. He is primarily a Mac user and is unfamiliar with reinstalling a Win OS. Obviously I can't test the machine without an OS, and reinstalling Win in his presence would take too long. Would it be possible to have a simple Linux desktop on a flash drive or CD to boot into, or do those devices require an installed OS?

If I get a Linux Live CD, will this boot on a machine with no OS? /DVD Drive?

Yes.

Yes, a CD or USB with Linux should be fine. If you have a spare hdd, the easiest fail-safe method would be to install Linux onto a hard drive and then put that into the W701. This avoids possible boot issues with the USB.

Pick a distribution which will support the Intel wifi card out of the box -- Mint Linux, for example.

Windows saves a bit to a low level of the disk which makes the disk unusable to (some) other windows installations. You can remove the bit by recreating the disk's partition table. In Linux this is straight forward with, for example, 'gparted' or 'fdisk'.

To remove the bit with gparted: Boot into a linux system, open gparted, pick the windows disk, and 'create a new partition table', apply. Done.

I'm more likely going to download a Mint Live CD on a CD, so I'm assuming the machine with no OS will recognize and boot from the optical drive. Does the Mint version have a GUI that will allow for mouse control of the computer?

He also has an HP 8740W with the same situation...a wiped drive. I don'y know yet if in the wiping process he deleted the partition. If he didn't is that a difficult thing to do, as the Win 7 I have is Ultimate, while his machines were running Pro.

In either case I'm a novice when it comes to formatting a drive, as I've never done it. Related to this question is whether I can take the drive from T60P, which has 7 Ultimate 32 on it and simply slip it into either computer? Would both machines recognize it, or would it have the wrong formatting on it?